Unto The Hyperborea

In 19--, the world leader in shower curtain technology, Aperture Science, had begun retrofitting an old icebreaker known as the Borealis with the express purpose of providing their scientists with ample space, privacy and security for their projects, as well as to provide a base from which they could hunt for something in the ice. This was noted in official press reports as being a simple attempt to launch into the fisherman industry by tailoring their inventions to the new demographic, and was largely forgotten about until the world was engulfed in metaphorical (and in many cases literal) fire by an incident in New Mexico known as the Resonance Cascade. And then, again, just a few days after in the incident across the world known as the Seven Hour War, in which the oh-so benevolent Combine empire colonized and converted the Earth into little more than a water fountain. What was not known is that the perpetrators of the Resonance Cascade, the Black Mesa Research Facility, largely known for their contracts in militaries across the world, had launched a competing project headed by many ex-Aperture employees, using dubiously legal insider knowledge to search for something in the arctic. The same something Aperture had either found or were in the process of finding. This ship, reportedly much to Black Mesa's administrator's amusement, was christened the Hyperborea. The Borealis was lost mere months before the unforeseen consequences of the Resonance Cascade, reportedly vanishing from its drydock, allegedly even taking chunks of the facility with it. The Hyperborea, undoubtedly as a result of some cosmic entity's sense of humor, shared the same fate, though to an undoubtedly more extreme degree. The Borealis merely found itself lodged in the ice of the arctic, lost for decades. The Hyperborea, on the other hand, found itself crossing space and time itself...